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Saturday, 23 May 2015

I couldn't decide between these two so I've started them simultaneously. I'm sure I'll end up focusing on one over the other as I progress, but I'm saving time for now.

Trenloe the Strong
Pretty simple start, just an airbrushed coat of Bronze Fleshtone over the grey primer for his skirt. I'll go back over it with a glaze of Leather Brown next as I really want to reproduce the rich mustard colour of the box art. Trenloe will also be treated to both silver and gold paints from the Vallejo Liquid Gold range, along with oil paint-based washes, so looking forward to that experiment. Here's the very humble beginnings:

Shiver
Up next is Shiver. I've done more on him only because there was more airbrush work required. I've airbrushed three colours here:
1) 50:50 Imperial Blue (IB) + Ultramarine Blue (UB) all over his cloak
2) Pure UB on roughly the top half of the cloak - I added thinner to keep this fairly subtle (about 20% thinner to 80% paint)
3) A very thin (3:1 thinner to paint) coat of Electric Blue (EB) on the side where his lantern is close to him

As you can see from the pics, the foundations for decent OSL are there, though it will look much better once his lantern isn't darker than the OSL.

Unfortunately throughout this process I discovered my Iwata HP-CS was jammed up from a poor cleaning last time I used it. It was actually so bad it refused to spray varnish on Belthir at all, so I had to strip it completely down and threw it in the Ultrasonic bath with about 30% Windex and the rest distillers water. Bit of a pain...

I was pleasantly surprised with the OSL section of the airbrushing though. By thinning the paint down so much I found I could set the PSI as low as 5-7, shoot extremely close to the miniature and just pull back on the trigger ever-so-slightly to get a very controlled flow without rivulets of paint jetting across the surface. Ok, that did happen at the start, but I cleaned it up with a wet brush and redid it ;)

Monday, 18 May 2015

Finally finished!! I've learnt a heap while painting him, but I'm keen to move on now.

So firstly I added a buttload of white to the final highlight colour and intended to paint a very fine line on the edges of the armour. Unfortunately they weren't nearly as fine as planned and now I'm a little angry with myself as its detracted from the overall effect. Not happy, but it'll have to do. C'est la vie.

Next I re-undercoated the weapon with Vallejo Grey Primer, using a rubber glove and some rubber bands as a mask for the rest of the miniature, and airbrushed the basecoat mix while I was at it.

His pants were painted black, belt and weapon haft with a 50:50 mix of Dark Fleshtone and Beasty Brown followed by straight Beasty Brown, and his loincloth was undercoated in 50:50 Black and Red Gore, based in Red Gore, then highlighted with Bloody Red, Hot Orange and Orange Fire.

I then proceeded to paint his weapon using the same process as his armour, but with the correct NNM highlights this time. The transitions weren't quite as smooth as the armour, but they're ok - clearly I need more practice in blending over a very small surface area.

Next up was a VGC Brown Ink wash for the weapon haft and belt, the weapon faces were finished in black and the pants were highlighted in a very dark mix of grey and black.

Finally, I mounted the wings, then painted and mounted his base before sealing everything in several coats of satin varnish. The base was painted with 50:50 Black and Cold Grey, before a heavy drybrush Cold Grey and a heavy wash of VGC Sepia Ink that was brushed away in patches before it completely dried to give it a dark dirty look.

Phew, I'm tired from just writing all that!

I've got a choice to make now - I have two heroes to paint, but each will require very different techniques. Shiver will require some airbrushing and a lot of traditional brushwork, but I'm planning on trying OSL for the first time on him as he's carrying a lantern. Trenloe the Strong should be much faster to finish, but I want to try my range of Vallejo Liquid metal paints for the first time necessitating the use of isopropyl alcohol as a thinner, and then wash using Oil Paints and Mineral Turpentine (which I've also never tried), so either way will expand my techniques. Guess you'll just have to stay tuned to find out who's up next! Until then, happy painting :)

Sunday, 10 May 2015

Well, the final coat is on and I'm declaring this little foray into NNM closed! (Though while writing this I've realised I forgot to add some highlights in the darkest areas. Bugger!)

Final stages:
7) 2nd Shade: 2DG:2IB:2T

8) Final Highlight: 2EG:2EB:4W:6T:2SD

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the result given this is my first attempt at NNM and 2-brush blending. I've learnt a crap load and I'm confident my next attempt will be even better. The one key learning I took away was that the base coat is so very important to get smooth. I really wish I'd spent the time to mask the red hide and then airbrush the base coat on the armour as it would have prevented the quite ugly build up I had to work around having put 3 base coats on. Amateur move, but you live, learn and move forward.

You might notice from the last photo that I've started reapplying undercoat to the weapon. I realised that I completely messed up the highlight locations and figured it'd be easier to start again that try to save it.

The next update should see Belthir finished: I just need to do the weapon, black leggings and his loin cloth in a nice warm red. Might be a few days before the next update as a result, we'll have to see :)

Friday, 8 May 2015

The saga continues! Rather than go back in with the base colour, I decided to use the 1st highlight colour instead. I found this smoothed out the transitions a great deal and cleaned things up a fair bit. You might also notice that not only am I thinning more (due to what I learned from my last 2 highlights), but I've also introduced some Liquitex Slow Dry, just to ensure I get a bit more time to smooth transitions with a damp brush if I need to.

5) Re-highlight: 2SG:2MB:2T:1SD

6) 1st Shade: 2DG:1MB:1IB:2T:1SD

I'm starting to try to keep the photos consistent as it's easier to see the progress. All in all I'm very happy so far, the shading is really starting to pull everything together. I may actually go back in before I continue though, as I think the large chest piece on the right could do with darkening at the bottom.

Thursday, 7 May 2015

Sorry for the sporadic posts - I save stuff up for a bigger post, then get to work and think "it's gonna be a while before I paint again, I may as well post what I have", and it always seems to be that night I get some more time to paint. Oh well.

So, I feel like I'm having a bit more success with smooth blends, and I'm at least seeing some results. I'm using a two-brush blending technique - essentially I hold a damp clean brush in my mouth, use the colour brush to apply some paint, then quickly feather it with the clean brush. Rinse, repeat.

While experimenting with this technique (which I'm preferring over wet-blending at the moment at it seems more suited to the tiny areas I'm working on), I'm refining as a I go.

I've found that increasing my thinner amount to the point that the paint is basically like skim milk is helping immensely with the blend, almost to the point of not even needing to feather with the second brush. I load up the brush with paint, draw the stroke from where I want the least amount of colour to where I want the most, and lift off. Where I start the stroke gets so little colour it's invisible, and where I end the stroke gets a pure new colour, with a smooth transition in between.

It's not perfect, and there's areas I want to go back over with the base coat, but I'm finding it terribly effective - you can mainly see it on the chest plate.

Anyway, I've applied the last two highlight layers for now, let me know what you think.

3) 2nd Highlight: 1SG:1MB:1EG:1EB:2T

4) 3rd Highlight: 2EG:2EB:3T

Next up is to clean up the transitions by reapplying the base colour, then the three layers of shading and defining the lines between the armour segments. Then another highlight, wash/glazes if necessary, and finally edge highlighting and hot-spots. Phew!

From the gate I've realised just how low coverage these colours are, and even applying a thin coat of the basecoat started to show brushstrokes on the model. Instead of cake things on, I've gone for several thin layers and have added a drop of Vallejo Airbrush Thinner to ensure I don't get too much paint build up. Even so, after 4 coats I started to see some surface deposits so I stopped there - I'm hoping subsequent layers smooth out any colour inconsistencies still present.

My results so far are as follows:
1) Basecoat = 2DG:2MB:1T x 3

2) 1st Highlight: 2SG:2MB:1T

As you can see, I haven't made much progress :( The first highlight is surprisingly subtle and I'm actually a bit worried I'm going to run out of space for the next layers, but we'll have to see.

That hasn't been all my hobby work lately though (to be honest, the painting has been disappointingly slow).

In the background I've started working on a foam-core insert for the Descent 2E core game box. I'm up to 6 expansions, 17 lieutenant packs and 3 Hero & Monster packs, and while that all comes with a metric shitload of tokens and cards and tiles, FFG give you absolutely no way to organise any of it. I've been keeping the tokens in a fishing tackle box, cards in card boxes (a total of 4 at present), miniatures in my glass display cabinet and map tiles in the original 5 game boxes. Completely impractical!

So, after searching the web and forums I decided to steal the brilliant idea from Esoteric Order of Gamers (Link) but design my own inserts to support an ever-growing collection of tokens and cards. Here's my Work in Progress of the first layer - it fits snugly in the original game box and stores all the cards from all expansions with room for growth as well as some of the less-used tokens. Next up will be a sub-layer to fill the gap on top of the Hero Cards, to store the rest of the tokens, dice and doors/portcullises/shrubberies. Finally, there will hopefully be room for a second whole layer above that to store the map tiles, but I may just build a multi-layer map storage insert for one of the larger expansion boxes so I can store all map tiles together.

Note the custom card dividers - they took longer to make than the insert has so far!

I'm also working on a storage solution for all the miniatures but that's a post for another day.